Wil McCarthy The Queendom of Sol 03 Lost in Transmission (Bantam)

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on a whim, Conrad had crossed the scheduled spin-up off his list and ordered
his people to print up hundreds of gravity lasers and scatter them every which
way throughout the structure.
The results were interesting to say the least, especially after their long
imprisonment in the narrow tower ofNewhope . This particular conversation
found Conrad and Bascal in a maze of transparent surfaces, facing each other
at right angles, with a sketchplate hovering uncertainly in the air between
them while the khaki light of P2 glowered down motionlessly from above.
Theoretically, the king continued, the next step is wisdom, the sum and
synthesis of knowledge. But the more I think about it, the more I think that s
a quality I ve never seen. I m sure it exists somewhere there are sixty
billion humans in the universe so far, and at least a few more arriving every
day but wisdom has a quality of mirage about it, retreating when inspected.
Historical figures have the benefit of distance, and are incapable of making
new mistakes, so we re free to see them as wiser figures than anyone
contemporary. But there will be no new historical figures, will there? We are
all of us contemporary, always and forever.
And the wise woman is always a puffed-up biddy when you get to know her,
isn t she? The wise man is a fretting gambler. If you guess right a hundred
times, my boy, people will call you wise. But with all those billions of
people kicking around, statistical narrowing demands that there be winners,
even if all the decisions are random. There will be people who have always
guessed right, every time in their lives. But it s meaningless, isn t it?
Because if their next action is also a guess, it will have no more validity,
no greater chance of success, than the cockamamie theories of a punk in some
kiddie caf�. We most of us fail, Conrad, but we find our strength in numbers.
Ifsomeone succeeds, ifsomeone is wise, then civilization staggers forward, if
not happier then at least a little bit richer, a little bit grander.
Kind of a harsh view, Highness, Conrad said crossly. Be useful for a
minute. Focus. What can you tell me about the chlorine situation?
Conrad had been a little unnerved, at first, when he realized he was the
ranking officer for an entire planet, with hundreds of people answering to
him. Technically speaking, space crews fell under the command and jurisdiction
of the government of Barnard, hence of Bascal personally, and would eventually
be reconstituted as some sort of Royal Barnardean Navy, but none of that
long-term stuff had been unpacked yet.
The current government, such as it was, consisted of little more than
conversations over lunch and dinner, mainly between himself and Bascal, and
these were concerned as much with their old days at camp and in the Revolt as
with anything contemporary. And since Bascal, with a Juris Doctor, three PhDs,
and a ridiculous assortment of master s degrees, was taking a direct and
leading role in the sensor analysis, this placed him, in a funny way, under
Conrad s command.
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Bascal was currently specializing in the biology of the native life-forms and
their effects on the larger environment of the planet. But he required a
certain amount of direction and had to be pumped periodically for information.
For all his newfound age and gravity, he was a rather impulsive worker,
selecting random tasks and attacking them for a while with battering-ram
intensity, and then flitting on to something else, leaving a debris trail of
half-completed projects behind him. The jellycells! The lidicara! The
chlorine-producing algoids! Theweather !
It was hard to argue with this approach King Bruno had invented collapsium in
exactly this way, and in the following centuries had parlayed the discovery
all the way to the Nescog, the collapsium-veined telecom network which
permitted Queendom citizens to fax themselves anywhere at all, including
everywhere at once. But Conrad did not have centuries to wait, and the
analysis of P2 needed patience and focus far more than this lurching and
somewhat playacted brilliance. So Conrad found himself growing increasingly if
inappropriately bossy.
And while the King of Barnard was thirteen decades Conrad s senior by this
point, the new relationship seemed to bother him not at all. He was
enthusiastic and accommodating, as willing to take direction as to give it,
and Conrad found himself, for the first time in years, feeling the old bonds
of friendship come truly alive. Sure, the king had a bad case of the Fever,
and spoke like a bad echo of his father. But as a rebel, the Prince of Sol
hadn t needed any role models. By definition, almost, he d been his own man.
All he d had to do was struggle against the status quo, without having to
actually run anything himself! But as a king, what other lead did he have to
follow? Who but Bruno had ever been the immorbid king of an immorbid people?
And to fit himself into that mold, Bascal had to be a scientist in fact a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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